We take a look back through this generation and look at some of the multiplatforms ports for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, which were either terrible or downright unplayable. We have compiled them in a list of 5 worst console ports.
The PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 generation was certainly a interesting one. We had Cell processor along with Nvidia GPU on PS3, coupled with a split pool of ram, resulting in complicated hardware for PS3, earlier in the generation. On the other hand, we had Xbox 360 and its eSRAM that was coupled with a Triple Core Power PC, unified ram and Nvidia GPU, making it far easy to program then a PS3. As a result, a lot of the earlier multiplatform ports on PlayStation 3 ended up performing sub-par compared to Xbox 360. Now that things have reversed(PlayStation 4 is easier to develop and Xbox One is slightly harder), we are going to take a history lesson back to these multiplatform ports and compile a list of the worst ones.
Since we are talking about worst ports here; I will be mostly talking about Vanilla releases here. Some of the ports were later fixed or made playable by patches but the Vanilla release were the one with the most issues.
5. Crysis 3 (Xbox 360/PlayStation 3)
Crysis 3 was graphically amazing on consoles but its performance was atrocious. Playing the game, it seemed like Crytek went for graphics over playability since the frame rate was sub-par for the most part, resulting in increased latency in-game. It average around 20 fps and occassionally took a dive below it during some of the more chaotic scenes. It being a shooter didn’t exactly help at all. Thankfully, Crysis 3 also had the option for players to play the game stealthily i.e avoid the firefights. This did make the game playable otherwise the performance was so choppy that even Digital Foundry labeled it as “Truly shocking level of performance” in their Crysis 3 tech analysis.
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4. Bayonetta (Playstation 3)
Bayonetta was an exceptional game and perhaps the first one from Japanese developer Platinum Games, that made them famous worldwide. Unfortunately, Platinum Games only worked on Bayonetta for Xbox 360 and left Sega to port Bayonetta on PlayStation 3. It turned out to be a mess of epic proportions as Sega struggled to run the game on Sony’s hardware. The end result was a game that was not only a visual downgrade from the Xbox 360 version, it also ran at almost half of the fps! This shocking level of performance was later rectified through a patch but to date, it hasn’t been fully resolved yet. To start off, the Ps3 version was running at 30 fps compared to 60 fps of Xbox 360 version. The decrease in fps had a lot of impact since fast paced action games require precise input and hence latency is important for them. The special effects were also toned down and it was topped with screen tearing. Nevertheless, as it turned out, Platinum Games future titles were developed by themselves for both systems and they always took the PlayStation 3 as the lead platform.
3. Silent Hill HD Collection (PlayStation 3/Xbox 360)
We never thought that we will mention a HD remaster as worst port here but this one ended up so bad that we had to do it. Not only it got downgraded in term of graphics, the frame rate also suffered along with it and some of the effects especially the fog were completely gone from this remaster. Even the new voice acting was out of sync – to top it – it was worse then the original voice acting. They were so many complaints with this HD remaster that Konami offered the users to return this game and get a replacement from a select range of titles. There was a patch later released for PlayStation 3 version that attempted to fix most of the issues but still didn’t really fix majority of the big issues. If you want to play these classic Silent Hill games in true HD, you are better off playing them on PC.
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2. The Orange Box (PlayStation 3)
The Orange Box was a mess on PlayStation 3. Not only it arrived late after a delay, it also suffered with various issues ranging from frame rate drops to extremely long load times. Portal 1 was the most playable game so far but Half Life 2 suffered a variety of issues. Even with a mandatory 400 MB install; there were long load times, ranging from starting levels to loading checkpoints. At the end of day, it just became one of the many victims of lazy development on PlayStation 3. Portal 2 came out a few years later and ended up being the superior version on PlayStation 3. I guess Valve owned PlayStation 3 owners an apology and hence they worked hard to deliver it with Portal 2.
1. Skyrim (PlayStation 3)
This is perhaps the most broken AAA game at launch. Even the Xbox 360 version wasn’t safe from this all but the PlayStation 3 version in particular had such a massive bug that we still can’t imagine how it passed through Quality Assurance. The game apparently slowed down to a halt as users progressed through the game. What it means is that as you started a new game save and played it for, say like 10-20 hours, you would have started facing problem like frame rate slowing down to below 10 fps and stuttering. It literally became a slide show at that point. The problem was a major blunder for the PlayStation 3 version rendering it unplayable for the majority of the users. It took Betheseda ages to fix this through patches and during this time, they couldn’t even bring the DLCs to the PlayStation 3 version of the game because they were somehow incompetent with PlayStation 3 development.
What do you think of this list? Let us know in the comments below.
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